I know that / is illegal in Linux, and the following are illegal in Windows
(I think) * . " / \ [ ] : ; | ,
What else am I missing?
I need a comprehensive guide, however, and one that takes into account
double-byte characters. Linking to outside resources is fine with me.
I need to first create a directory on the filesystem using a name that may
contain forbidden characters, so I plan to replace those characters with
underscores. I then need to write this directory and its contents to a zip file
(using Java), so any additional advice concerning the names of zip directories
would be appreciated.
The forbidden printable ASCII characters are:
Linux/Unix:
/ (forward slash)
Windows:
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon - sometimes works, but is actually NTFS Alternate Data Streams)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)
Non-printable characters
If your data comes from a source that would permit non-printable characters then there is more to check for.
Linux/Unix:
0 (NULL byte)
Windows:
0-31 (ASCII control characters)
Note: While it is legal under Linux/Unix file systems to create files with control characters in the filename, it might be a nightmare for the users to deal with such files.
Reserved file names
The following filenames are reserved:
Windows:
CON, PRN, AUX, NUL
COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9
LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9
(both on their own and with arbitrary file extensions, e.g. LPT1.txt).
Other rules
Windows:
Filenames cannot end in a space or dot.
macOS:
You didn't ask for it, but just in case: Colon : and forward slash / depending on context are not permitted (e.g. Finder supports slashes, terminal supports colons). (More details)
A “comprehensive guide” of forbidden filename characters is not going to work on Windows because it reserves filenames as well as characters. Yes, characters like
* " ? and others are forbidden, but there are a infinite number of names composed only of valid characters that are forbidden. For example, spaces and dots are valid filename characters, but names composed only of those characters are forbidden.
Windows does not distinguish between upper-case and lower-case characters, so you cannot create a folder named A if one named a already exists. Worse, seemingly-allowed names like PRN and CON, and many others, are reserved and not allowed. Windows also has several length restrictions; a filename valid in one folder may become invalid if moved to another folder. The rules for
naming files and folders
are on the Microsoft docs.
You cannot, in general, use user-generated text to create Windows directory names. If you want to allow users to name anything they want, you have to create safe names like A, AB, A2 et al., store user-generated names and their path equivalents in an application data file, and perform path mapping in your application.
If you absolutely must allow user-generated folder names, the only way to tell if they are invalid is to catch exceptions and assume the name is invalid. Even that is fraught with peril, as the exceptions thrown for denied access, offline drives, and out of drive space overlap with those that can be thrown for invalid names. You are opening up one huge can of hurt.
Under Linux and other Unix-related systems, there were traditionally only two characters that could not appear in the name of a file or directory, and those are NUL '\0' and slash '/'. The slash, of course, can appear in a pathname, separating directory components.
Rumour1 has it that Steven Bourne (of 'shell' fame) had a directory containing 254 files, one for every single letter (character code) that can appear in a file name (excluding /, '\0'; the name . was the current directory, of course). It was used to test the Bourne shell and routinely wrought havoc on unwary programs such as backup programs.
Other people have covered the rules for Windows filenames, with links to Microsoft and Wikipedia on the topic.
Note that MacOS X has a case-insensitive file system. Current versions of it appear to allow colon : in file names, though historically that was not necessarily always the case:
$ echo a:b > a:b
$ ls -l a:b
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathanleffler staff 4 Nov 12 07:38 a:b
$
However, at least with macOS Big Sur 11.7, the file system does not allow file names that are not valid UTF-8 strings. That means the file name cannot consist of the bytes that are always invalid in UTF-8 (0xC0, 0xC1, 0xF5-0xFF), and you can't use the continuation bytes 0x80..0xBF as the only byte in a file name. The error given is 92 Illegal byte sequence.
POSIX defines a Portable Filename Character Set consisting of:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . _ -
Sticking with names formed solely from those characters avoids most of the problems, though Windows still adds some complications.
1 It was Kernighan & Pike in ['The Practice of Programming'](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/tpop.webpage/) who said as much in Chapter 6, Testing, §6.5 Stress Tests:
When Steve Bourne was writing his Unix shell (which came to be known as the Bourne shell), he made a directory of 254 files with one-character names, one for each byte value except '\0' and slash, the two characters that cannot appear in Unix file names. He used that directory for all manner of tests of pattern-matching and tokenization. (The test directory was of course created by a program.) For years afterwards, that directory was the bane of file-tree-walking programs; it tested them to destruction.
Note that the directory must have contained entries . and .., so it was arguably 253 files (and 2 directories), or 255 name entries, rather than 254 files. This doesn't affect the effectiveness of the anecdote, or the careful testing it describes.
TPOP was previously at
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop and
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop but both are now (2021-11-12) broken.
See also Wikipedia on TPOP.
Instead of creating a blacklist of characters, you could use a whitelist. All things considered, the range of characters that make sense in a file or directory name context is quite short, and unless you have some very specific naming requirements your users will not hold it against your application if they cannot use the whole ASCII table.
It does not solve the problem of reserved names in the target file system, but with a whitelist it is easier to mitigate the risks at the source.
In that spirit, this is a range of characters that can be considered safe:
Letters (a-z A-Z) - Unicode characters as well, if needed
Digits (0-9)
Underscore (_)
Hyphen (-)
Space
Dot (.)
And any additional safe characters you wish to allow. Beyond this, you just have to enforce some additional rules regarding spaces and dots. This is usually sufficient:
Name must contain at least one letter or number (to avoid only dots/spaces)
Name must start with a letter or number (to avoid leading dots/spaces)
Name may not end with a dot or space (simply trim those if present, like Explorer does)
This already allows quite complex and nonsensical names. For example, these names would be possible with these rules, and be valid file names in Windows/Linux:
A...........ext
B -.- .ext
In essence, even with so few whitelisted characters you should still decide what actually makes sense, and validate/adjust the name accordingly. In one of my applications, I used the same rules as above but stripped any duplicate dots and spaces.
The easy way to get Windows to tell you the answer is to attempt to rename a file via Explorer and type in a backslash, /, for the new name. Windows will popup a message box telling you the list of illegal characters.
A filename cannot contain any of the following characters:
\ / : * ? " < > |
Microsoft Docs - Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces - Naming Conventions
Well, if only for research purposes, then your best bet is to look at this Wikipedia entry on Filenames.
If you want to write a portable function to validate user input and create filenames based on that, the short answer is don't. Take a look at a portable module like Perl's File::Spec to have a glimpse to all the hops needed to accomplish such a "simple" task.
Discussing different possible approaches
Difficulties with defining, what's legal and not were already adressed and whitelists were suggested. But not only Windows, but also many unixoid OSes support more-than-8-bit characters such as Unicode. You could here also talk about encodings such as UTF-8. You can consider Jonathan Leffler's comment, where he gives info about modern Linux and describes details for MacOS. Wikipedia states, that (for example) the
modifier letter colon [(See 7. below) is] sometimes used in Windows filenames as it is identical to the colon in the Segoe UI font used for filenames. The [inherited ASCII] colon itself is not permitted.
Therefore, I want to present a much more liberal approach using Unicode Homoglyph characters to replace the "illegal" ones. I found the result in my comparable use-case by far more readable and it's only limited by the used font, which is very broad, 3903 characters for Windows default. Plus you can even restore the original content from the replacements.
Possible choices and research notes
To keep things organized, I will always give the character, it's name and the hexadecimal number representation. The latter is is not case sensitive and leading zeroes can be added or ommitted freely, so for example U+002A and u+2a are equivalent. If available, I'll try to point to more info or alternatives - feel free to show me more or better ones.
Instead of * (U+2A * ASTERISK), you can use one of the many listed, for example U+2217 ∗ (ASTERISK OPERATOR) or the Full Width Asterisk U+FF0A ＊. u+20f0 ⃰ combining asterisk above from combining diacritical marks for symbols might also be a valid choice. You can read 4. for more info about the combining characters.
Instead of . (U+2E . full stop), one of these could be a good option, for example ⋅ U+22C5 dot operator.
Instead of " (U+22 " quotation mark), you can use “ U+201C english leftdoublequotemark, more alternatives see here. I also included some of the good suggestions of Wally Brockway's answer, in this case u+2036 ‶ reversed double prime and u+2033 ″ double prime - I will from now on denote ideas from that source by ¹³.
Instead of / (U+2F / SOLIDUS), you can use ∕ DIVISION SLASH U+2215 (others here), ̸ U+0338 COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY, ̷ COMBINING SHORT SOLIDUS OVERLAY U+0337 or u+2044 ⁄ fraction slash¹³. Be aware about spacing for some characters, including the combining or overlay ones, as they have no width and can produce something like -> ̸th̷is which is ̸th̷is. With added spaces you get -> ̸ th ̷ is, which is ̸ th ̷ is. The second one (COMBINING SHORT SOLIDUS OVERLAY) looks bad in the stackoverflow-font.
Instead of \ (U+5C Reverse solidus), you can use ⧵ U+29F5 Reverse solidus operator (more) or u+20E5 ⃥ combining reverse solidus overlay¹³.
To replace [ (U+5B [ Left square bracket) and ] (U+005D ] Right square bracket), you can use for example U+FF3B［ FULLWIDTH LEFT SQUARE BRACKET and U+FF3D ］FULLWIDTH RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET (from here, more possibilities here).
Instead of : (u+3a : colon), you can use U+2236 ∶ RATIO (for mathematical usage) or U+A789 ꞉ MODIFIER LETTER COLON, (see colon (letter), sometimes used in Windows filenames as it is identical to the colon in the Segoe UI font used for filenames. The colon itself is not permitted ... source and more replacements see here). Another alternative is this one: u+1361 ፡ ethiopic wordspace¹³.
Instead of ; (u+3b ; semicolon), you can use U+037E ; GREEK QUESTION MARK (see here).
For | (u+7c | vertical line), there are some good substitutes such as: U+2223 ∣ DIVIDES, U+0964 । DEVANAGARI DANDA, U+01C0 ǀ LATIN LETTER DENTAL CLICK (the last ones from Wikipedia) or U+2D4F ⵏ Tifinagh Letter Yan. Also the box drawing characters contain various other options.
Instead of , (, U+002C COMMA), you can use for example ‚ U+201A SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (see here).
For ? (U+003F ? QUESTION MARK), these are good candidates: U+FF1F ？ FULLWIDTH QUESTION MARK or U+FE56 ﹖ SMALL QUESTION MARK (from here and here). There are also two more from the Dingbats Block (search for "question") and the u+203d ‽ interrobang¹³.
While my machine seems to accept it unchanged, I still want to include > (u+3e greater-than sign) and < (u+3c less-than sign) for the sake of completeness. The best replacement here is probably also from the quotation block, such as u+203a › single right-pointing angle quotation mark and u+2039 ‹ single left-pointing angle quotation mark respectively. The tifinagh block only contains ⵦ (u+2D66)¹³ to replace <. The last notion is ⋖ less-than with dot u+22D6 and ⋗ greater-than with dot u+22D7.
For additional ideas, you can also look for example into this block. You still want more ideas? You can try to draw your desired character and look at the suggestions here.
How do you type these characters
Say you want to type ⵏ (Tifinagh Letter Yan). To get all of its information, you can always search for this character (ⵏ) on a suited platform such as this Unicode Lookup (please add 0x when you search for hex) or that Unicode Table (that only allows to search for the name, in this case "Tifinagh Letter Yan"). You should obtain its Unicode number U+2D4F and the HTML-code ⵏ (note that 2D4F is hexadecimal for 11599). With this knowledge, you have several options to produce these special characters including the use of
code points to unicode converter or again the Unicode Lookup to reversely convert the numerical representation into the unicode character (remember to set the code point base below to decimal or hexadecimal respectively)
a one-liner makro in Autohotkey: :?*:altpipe::{U+2D4F} to type ⵏ instead of the string altpipe - this is the way I input those special characters, my Autohotkey script can be shared if there is common interest
Alt Characters or alt-codes by pressing and holding alt, followed by the decimal number for the desired character (more info for example here, look at a table here or there). For the example, that would be Alt+11599. Be aware, that many programs do not fully support this windows feature for all of unicode (as of time writing). Microsoft Office is an exception where it usually works, some other OSes provide similar functionality. Typing these chars with Alt-combinations into MS Word is also the way Wally Brockway suggests in his answer¹³ that was already mentionted - if you don't want to transfer all the hexadecimal values to the decimal asc, you can find some of them there¹³.
in MS Office, you can also use ALT + X as described in this MS article to produce the chars
if you rarely need it, you can of course still just copy-paste the special character of your choice instead of typing it
For Windows you can check it using PowerShell
$PathInvalidChars = [System.IO.Path]::GetInvalidPathChars() #36 chars
To display UTF-8 codes you can convert
$enc = [system.Text.Encoding]::UTF8
$PathInvalidChars | foreach { $enc.GetBytes($_) }
$FileNameInvalidChars = [System.IO.Path]::GetInvalidFileNameChars() #41 chars
$FileOnlyInvalidChars = #(':', '*', '?', '\', '/') #5 chars - as a difference
For anyone looking for a regex:
const BLACKLIST = /[<>:"\/\\|?*]/g;
In Windows 10 (2019), the following characters are forbidden by an error when you try to type them:
A file name can't contain any of the following characters:
\ / : * ? " < > |
Here's a c# implementation for windows based on Christopher Oezbek's answer
It was made more complex by the containsFolder boolean, but hopefully covers everything
/// <summary>
/// This will replace invalid chars with underscores, there are also some reserved words that it adds underscore to
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1976007/what-characters-are-forbidden-in-windows-and-linux-directory-names
/// </remarks>
/// <param name="containsFolder">Pass in true if filename represents a folder\file (passing true will allow slash)</param>
public static string EscapeFilename_Windows(string filename, bool containsFolder = false)
{
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(filename.Length + 12);
int index = 0;
// Allow colon if it's part of the drive letter
if (containsFolder)
{
Match match = Regex.Match(filename, #"^\s*[A-Z]:\\", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
if (match.Success)
{
builder.Append(match.Value);
index = match.Length;
}
}
// Character substitutions
for (int cntr = index; cntr < filename.Length; cntr++)
{
char c = filename[cntr];
switch (c)
{
case '\u0000':
case '\u0001':
case '\u0002':
case '\u0003':
case '\u0004':
case '\u0005':
case '\u0006':
case '\u0007':
case '\u0008':
case '\u0009':
case '\u000A':
case '\u000B':
case '\u000C':
case '\u000D':
case '\u000E':
case '\u000F':
case '\u0010':
case '\u0011':
case '\u0012':
case '\u0013':
case '\u0014':
case '\u0015':
case '\u0016':
case '\u0017':
case '\u0018':
case '\u0019':
case '\u001A':
case '\u001B':
case '\u001C':
case '\u001D':
case '\u001E':
case '\u001F':
case '<':
case '>':
case ':':
case '"':
case '/':
case '|':
case '?':
case '*':
builder.Append('_');
break;
case '\\':
builder.Append(containsFolder ? c : '_');
break;
default:
builder.Append(c);
break;
}
}
string built = builder.ToString();
if (built == "")
{
return "_";
}
if (built.EndsWith(" ") || built.EndsWith("."))
{
built = built.Substring(0, built.Length - 1) + "_";
}
// These are reserved names, in either the folder or file name, but they are fine if following a dot
// CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0 .. COM9, LPT0 .. LPT9
builder = new StringBuilder(built.Length + 12);
index = 0;
foreach (Match match in Regex.Matches(built, #"(^|\\)\s*(?<bad>CON|PRN|AUX|NUL|COM\d|LPT\d)\s*(\.|\\|$)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase))
{
Group group = match.Groups["bad"];
if (group.Index > index)
{
builder.Append(built.Substring(index, match.Index - index + 1));
}
builder.Append(group.Value);
builder.Append("_"); // putting an underscore after this keyword is enough to make it acceptable
index = group.Index + group.Length;
}
if (index == 0)
{
return built;
}
if (index < built.Length - 1)
{
builder.Append(built.Substring(index));
}
return builder.ToString();
}
Though the only illegal Unix chars might be / and NULL, although some consideration for command line interpretation should be included.
For example, while it might be legal to name a file 1>&2 or 2>&1 in Unix, file names such as this might be misinterpreted when used on a command line.
Similarly it might be possible to name a file $PATH, but when trying to access it from the command line, the shell will translate $PATH to its variable value.
The .NET Framework System.IO provides the following functions for invalid file system characters:
Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars
Path.GetInvalidPathChars
Those functions should return appropriate results depending on the platform the .NET runtime is running in. That said, the Remarks in the documentation pages for those functions say:
The array returned from this method is not guaranteed to contain the
complete set of characters that are invalid in file and directory
names. The full set of invalid characters can vary by file system.
I always assumed that banned characters in Windows filenames meant that all exotic characters would also be outlawed. The inability to use ?, / and : in particular irked me. One day I discovered that it was virtually only those chars which were banned. Other Unicode characters may be used. So the nearest Unicode characters to the banned ones I could find were identified and MS Word macros were made for them as Alt+?, Alt+: etc. Now I form the filename in Word, using the substitute chars, and copy it to the Windows filename. So far I have had no problems.
Here are the substitute chars (Alt + the decimal Unicode) :
⃰ ⇔ Alt8432
⁄ ⇔ Alt8260
⃥ ⇔ Alt8421
∣ ⇔ Alt8739
ⵦ ⇔ Alt11622
⮚ ⇔ Alt11162
‽ ⇔ Alt8253
፡ ⇔ Alt4961
‶ ⇔ Alt8246
″ ⇔ Alt8243
As a test I formed a filename using all of those chars and Windows accepted it.
This is good enough for me in Python:
def fix_filename(name, max_length=255):
"""
Replace invalid characters on Linux/Windows/MacOS with underscores.
List from https://stackoverflow.com/a/31976060/819417
Trailing spaces & periods are ignored on Windows.
>>> fix_filename(" COM1 ")
'_ COM1 _'
>>> fix_filename("COM10")
'COM10'
>>> fix_filename("COM1,")
'COM1,'
>>> fix_filename("COM1.txt")
'_.txt'
>>> all('_' == fix_filename(chr(i)) for i in list(range(32)))
True
"""
return re.sub(r'[/\\:|<>"?*\0-\x1f]|^(AUX|COM[1-9]|CON|LPT[1-9]|NUL|PRN)(?![^.])|^\s|[\s.]$', "_", name[:max_length], flags=re.IGNORECASE)
See also this outdated list for additional legacy stuff like = in FAT32.
As of 18/04/2017, no simple black or white list of characters and filenames is evident among the answers to this topic - and there are many replies.
The best suggestion I could come up with was to let the user name the file however he likes. Using an error handler when the application tries to save the file, catch any exceptions, assume the filename is to blame (obviously after making sure the save path was ok as well), and prompt the user for a new file name. For best results, place this checking procedure within a loop that continues until either the user gets it right or gives up. Worked best for me (at least in VBA).
In Unix shells, you can quote almost every character in single quotes '. Except the single quote itself, and you can't express control characters, because \ is not expanded. Accessing the single quote itself from within a quoted string is possible, because you can concatenate strings with single and double quotes, like 'I'"'"'m' which can be used to access a file called "I'm" (double quote also possible here).
So you should avoid all control characters, because they are too difficult to enter in the shell. The rest still is funny, especially files starting with a dash, because most commands read those as options unless you have two dashes -- before, or you specify them with ./, which also hides the starting -.
If you want to be nice, don't use any of the characters the shell and typical commands use as syntactical elements, sometimes position dependent, so e.g. you can still use -, but not as first character; same with ., you can use it as first character only when you mean it ("hidden file"). When you are mean, your file names are VT100 escape sequences ;-), so that an ls garbles the output.
When creating internet shortcuts in Windows, to create the file name, it skips illegal characters, except for forward slash, which is converted to minus.
I had the same need and was looking for recommendation or standard references and came across this thread. My current blacklist of characters that should be avoided in file and directory names are:
$CharactersInvalidForFileName = {
"pound" -> "#",
"left angle bracket" -> "<",
"dollar sign" -> "$",
"plus sign" -> "+",
"percent" -> "%",
"right angle bracket" -> ">",
"exclamation point" -> "!",
"backtick" -> "`",
"ampersand" -> "&",
"asterisk" -> "*",
"single quotes" -> "“",
"pipe" -> "|",
"left bracket" -> "{",
"question mark" -> "?",
"double quotes" -> "”",
"equal sign" -> "=",
"right bracket" -> "}",
"forward slash" -> "/",
"colon" -> ":",
"back slash" -> "\\",
"lank spaces" -> "b",
"at sign" -> "#"
};
I am tired of always trying to guess, if I should escape special characters like '()[]{}|' etc. when using many implementations of regexps.
It is different with, for example, Python, sed, grep, awk, Perl, rename, Apache, find and so on.
Is there any rule set which tells when I should, and when I should not, escape special characters? Does it depend on the regexp type, like PCRE, POSIX or extended regexps?
Which characters you must and which you mustn't escape indeed depends on the regex flavor you're working with.
For PCRE, and most other so-called Perl-compatible flavors, escape these outside character classes:
.^$*+?()[{\|
and these inside character classes:
^-]\
For POSIX extended regexes (ERE), escape these outside character classes (same as PCRE):
.^$*+?()[{\|
Escaping any other characters is an error with POSIX ERE.
Inside character classes, the backslash is a literal character in POSIX regular expressions. You cannot use it to escape anything. You have to use "clever placement" if you want to include character class metacharacters as literals. Put the ^ anywhere except at the start, the ] at the start, and the - at the start or the end of the character class to match these literally, e.g.:
[]^-]
In POSIX basic regular expressions (BRE), these are metacharacters that you need to escape to suppress their meaning:
.^$*[\
Escaping parentheses and curly brackets in BREs gives them the special meaning their unescaped versions have in EREs. Some implementations (e.g. GNU) also give special meaning to other characters when escaped, such as \? and +. Escaping a character other than .^$*(){} is normally an error with BREs.
Inside character classes, BREs follow the same rule as EREs.
If all this makes your head spin, grab a copy of RegexBuddy. On the Create tab, click Insert Token, and then Literal. RegexBuddy will add escapes as needed.
Modern RegEx Flavors (PCRE)
Includes C, C++, Delphi, EditPad, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP (preg), PostgreSQL, PowerGREP, PowerShell, Python, REALbasic, Real Studio, Ruby, TCL, VB.Net, VBScript, wxWidgets, XML Schema, Xojo, XRegExp.PCRE compatibility may vary
Anywhere: . ^ $ * + - ? ( ) [ ] { } \ |
Legacy RegEx Flavors (BRE/ERE)
Includes awk, ed, egrep, emacs, GNUlib, grep, PHP (ereg), MySQL, Oracle, R, sed.PCRE support may be enabled in later versions or by using extensions
ERE/awk/egrep/emacs
Outside a character class: . ^ $ * + ? ( ) [ { } \ |
Inside a character class: ^ - [ ]
BRE/ed/grep/sed
Outside a character class: . ^ $ * [ \
Inside a character class: ^ - [ ]
For literals, don't escape: + ? ( ) { } |
For standard regex behavior, escape: \+ \? \( \) \{ \} \|
Notes
If unsure about a specific character, it can be escaped like \xFF
Alphanumeric characters cannot be escaped with a backslash
Arbitrary symbols can be escaped with a backslash in PCRE, but not BRE/ERE (they must only be escaped when required). For PCRE ] - only need escaping within a character class, but I kept them in a single list for simplicity
Quoted expression strings must also have the surrounding quote characters escaped, and often with backslashes doubled-up (like "(\")(/)(\\.)" versus /(")(\/)(\.)/ in JavaScript)
Aside from escapes, different regex implementations may support different modifiers, character classes, anchors, quantifiers, and other features. For more details, check out regular-expressions.info, or use regex101.com to test your expressions live
Unfortunately there really isn't a set set of escape codes since it varies based on the language you are using.
However, keeping a page like the Regular Expression Tools Page or this Regular Expression Cheatsheet can go a long way to help you quickly filter things out.
POSIX recognizes multiple variations on regular expressions - basic regular expressions (BRE) and extended regular expressions (ERE). And even then, there are quirks because of the historical implementations of the utilities standardized by POSIX.
There isn't a simple rule for when to use which notation, or even which notation a given command uses.
Check out Jeff Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions book.
Unfortunately, the meaning of things like ( and \( are swapped between Emacs style regular expressions and most other styles. So if you try to escape these you may be doing the opposite of what you want.
So you really have to know what style you are trying to quote.
Really, there isn't. there are about a half-zillion different regex syntaxes; they seem to come down to Perl, EMACS/GNU, and AT&T in general, but I'm always getting surprised too.
Sometimes simple escaping is not possible with the characters you've listed. For example, using a backslash to escape a bracket isn't going to work in the left hand side of a substitution string in sed, namely
sed -e 's/foo\(bar/something_else/'
I tend to just use a simple character class definition instead, so the above expression becomes
sed -e 's/foo[(]bar/something_else/'
which I find works for most regexp implementations.
BTW Character classes are pretty vanilla regexp components so they tend to work in most situations where you need escaped characters in regexps.
Edit: After the comment below, just thought I'd mention the fact that you also have to consider the difference between finite state automata and non-finite state automata when looking at the behaviour of regexp evaluation.
You might like to look at "the shiny ball book" aka Effective Perl (sanitised Amazon link), specifically the chapter on regular expressions, to get a feel for then difference in regexp engine evaluation types.
Not all the world's a PCRE!
Anyway, regexp's are so clunky compared to SNOBOL! Now that was an interesting programming course! Along with the one on Simula.
Ah the joys of studying at UNSW in the late '70's! (-:
https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Quoting-metacharacters and https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/quotemeta.html
In the official documentation, such characters are called metacharacters. Example of quoting:
my $regex = quotemeta($string)
s/$regex/something/
For PHP, "it is always safe to precede a non-alphanumeric with "\" to specify that it stands for itself." - http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.escape.php.
Except if it's a " or '. :/
To escape regex pattern variables (or partial variables) in PHP use preg_quote()
To know when and what to escape without attempts is necessary to understand precisely the chain of contexts the string pass through. You will specify the string from the farthest side to its final destination which is the memory handled by the regexp parsing code.
Be aware how the string in memory is processed: if can be a plain string inside the code, or a string entered to the command line, but a could be either an interactive command line or a command line stated inside a shell script file, or inside a variable in memory mentioned by the code, or an (string)argument through further evaluation, or a string containing code generated dynamically with any sort of encapsulation...
Each of this context assigned some characters with special functionality.
When you want to pass the character literally without using its special function (local to the context), than that's the case you have to escape it, for the next context... which might need some other escape characters which might additionally need to be escaped in the preceding context(s).
Furthermore there can be things like character encoding (the most insidious is utf-8 because it look like ASCII for common characters, but might be optionally interpreted even by the terminal depending on its settings so it might behave differently, then the encoding attribute of HTML/XML, it's necessary to understand the process precisely right.
E.g. A regexp in the command line starting with perl -npe, needs to be transferred to a set of exec system calls connecting as pipe the file handles, each of this exec system calls just has a list of arguments that were separated by (non escaped)spaces, and possibly pipes(|) and redirection (> N> N>&M), parenthesis, interactive expansion of * and ?, $(()) ... (all this are special characters used by the *sh which might appear to interfere with the character of the regular expression in the next context, but they are evaluated in order: before the command line. The command line is read by a program as bash/sh/csh/tcsh/zsh, essentially inside double quote or single quote the escape is simpler but it is not necessary to quote a string in the command line because mostly the space has to be prefixed with backslash and the quote are not necessary leaving available the expand functionality for characters * and ?, but this parse as different context as within quote. Then when the command line is evaluated the regexp obtained in memory (not as written in the command line) receives the same treatment as it would be in a source file.
For regexp there is character-set context within square brackets [ ], perl regular expression can be quoted by a large set of non alfa-numeric characters (E.g. m// or m:/better/for/path: ...).
You have more details about characters in other answer, which are very specific to the final regexp context. As I noted you mention that you find the regexp escape with attempts, that's probably because different context has different set of character that confused your memory of attempts (often backslash is the character used in those different context to escape a literal character instead of its function).
For Ionic (Typescript) you have to double slash in order to scape the characters.
For example (this is to match some special characters):
"^(?=.*[\\]\\[!¡\'=ªº\\-\\_ç##$%^&*(),;\\.?\":{}|<>\+\\/])"
Pay attention to this ] [ - _ . / characters. They have to be double slashed. If you don't do that, you are going to have a type error in your code.
to avoid having to worry about which regex variant and all the bespoke peculiarties, just use this generic function that covers every regex variant other than BRE (unless they have unicode multi-byte chars that are meta) :
jot -s '' -c - 32 126 |
mawk '
function ___(__,_) {
return substr(_="",
gsub("[][!-/_\140:-#{-~]","[&]",__),
gsub("["(_="\\\\")"^]",_ "&",__))__
} ($++NF = ___($!_))^_'
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
[!]["][#][$][%][&]['][(][)][*][+][,][-][.][/]
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 [:][;][<][=][>][?]
[#] ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ [[]\\ []]\^ [_]
[`] abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz [{][|][}][~]
square-brackets are much easier to deal with, since there's no risk of triggering warning messages about "escaping too much", e.g. :
function ____(_) {
return substr("", gsub("[[:punct:]]","\\\\&",_))_
}
\!\"\#\$\%\&\'\(\)\*\+\,\-\.\/ 0123456789\:\;\<\=\>\?
\#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\[\\\]\^\_\`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz \{\|\}\~
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\!' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\"' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\#' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\%' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\&' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\,' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\:' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\;' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\=' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\#' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\_' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\~' is not a known regexp operator
Using Raku (formerly known as Perl_6)
Works (backslash or quote all non-alphanumeric characters except underscore):
~$ raku -e 'say $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ \# \. \* \? /; #works fine'
｢#.*?｣
There exist six flavors of Regular Expression languages, according to Damian Conway's pdf/talk "Everything You Know About Regexes Is Wrong". Raku represents a significant (~15 year) re-working of standard Perl(5)/PCRE Regular Expressions.
In those 15 years the Perl_6 / Raku language experts decided that all non-alphanumeric characters (except underscore) shall be reserved as Regex metacharacters even if no present usage exists. To denote non-alphanumeric characters (except underscore) as literals, backslash or escape them.
So the above example prints the $/ match variable if a match to a literal #.*? character sequence is found. Below is what happens if you don't: # is interpreted as the start of a comment, . dot is interpreted as any character (including whitespace), * asterisk is interpreted as a zero-or-more quantifier, and ? question mark is interpreted as either a zero-or-one quantifier or a frugal (i.e. non-greedy) quantifier-modifier (depending on context):
Errors:
~$ ~$ raku -e 'say $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!'
===SORRY!===
Regex not terminated.
at -e:1
------> y $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!⏏<EOL>
Regex not terminated.
at -e:1
------> y $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!⏏<EOL>
Couldn't find terminator / (corresponding / was at line 1)
at -e:1
------> y $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!⏏<EOL>
expecting any of:
/
https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes
https://raku.org/